Terminator Salvation: Beyond the Charismatic Killing Machine

McG is not a douchebag and James Cameron is not Jesus Christ. A serious look at the return of a franchise — a fourth installment that explores the question of what's human and what's not. MORE FROM MOVIE WEEK: 75 Movies Every Man Should See, the summer's biggest little surprises, a first look at The Road, and more!

About ten minutes intoTerminator Salvation, there's a scene of rebirth. We know that it is a scene of rebirth because, first of all, it's wet. A storm is raging, lightning is streaking the sky, thunder is grunting on the soundtrack. Second, it's muddy. Well, slimy, because the mud is movie mud and is therefore not just earth mixed with water but the primordial ooze itself. Third, the character who is being reborn has a lot of muscles, and no clothes on, except the ooze, which comes in handy as a loincloth. And fourth, we thought we just saw him die, at the beginning of the movie. As Joseph McGinty Nichol, who directed Terminator Salvation — and goes by his nickname, McG — explains, "He finds himself waking up naked, disoriented, like Alice in Wonderland. No idea where he is. Not knowing if he's alive or dead. Is this what it means to be in heaven, hell, purgatory? Take your religious pick." Which leads us to the fifth reason we know that it's a scene of rebirth — the clincher:

There's a scream.

It is a big scream. It is an important and expensive Hollywood scream, in an important and expensive Hollywood movie. Indeed, in the entire history of action movies, there might not be another scream called upon to express so much. It's a literal scream, in that, as McG says, "This is Marcus" — the screaming character's name — "beginning his journey." It's a conceptual scream, in that it announces the theme of Terminator Salvation, which is not just the struggle to stay alive in the age of machines but the struggle to stay human. And it's a richly symbolic scream, in that... well, have you seen Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? It wasn't a bad movie, exactly; it just seemed unnecessary, and so it took the whole Terminator franchise out of the realm of myth and put it in the realm of efficient action-movie hackwork. And what's being reborn with the scream? What McG intends to be reborn is nothing less than the Terminator myth itself. This is what he means when he says that his first order of business as director of Terminator Salvation was to "reestablish credibility" for the series. This is what he's getting at when he says that he wants to "honor the mythology of the three movies. Really, the first two. I agree with Jim Cameron when he says that the story was largely told after the first two."

Jim Cameron, of course, wrote and directed the first two. He has an imagination, as well as a self-conception, that is exclusively and unapologetically mythic; it is no accident that the redemptive figure of all the Terminator movies, not to mention the TV show — John Connor, the savior of all humankind — was graced with the initials of Jesus Christ, who was graced with the initials of Jim Cameron. He's a tough act to follow, JC. But McG wants to follow him. He's honored to honor the myth — honored to be chosen as the myth's caretaker. He wants to be the one who receives the sacred fire, and the one who passes it on. And so the rebirth that concerns McG in Terminator Salvation is not just the rebirth of the character, Marcus Wright, or the rebirth of the Terminator franchise. It's McG's rebirth, as a director in the line of James Cameron rather than as a director in the line of Jonathan Mostow, who directed T3. No wonder there's a guy in his movie who wakes up naked and screaming. And no wonder the screaming that has defined Terminator Salvation from the outset has been so incredibly loud.

You see, nothing that takes place in Terminator Salvation exists without reference to something that has taken place in another of the Terminator movies. That's the downside of perpetuating a myth instead of just telling a story — the myth is grand and it's sweeping, but at the same time it's a closed loop, and everybody touched by it gets an expansive case of claustrophobia. And so just as you can't look at McG without comparing him with Jim Cameron, you can't hear Marcus's scream without comparing it with Christian Bale's. And Bale's scream — his endless stentorian castigation of McG's director of photography, recorded on the closed set of Terminator Salvation and then distributed virally on the Internet — is the Jim Cameron of screams. Hell, Bale, who plays John Connor in Terminator Salvation and is the nominal leading man, is the Jim Cameron of actors. Which is why when McG was looking for someone to cast as Marcus Wright, who gets as much screen time as John Connor, he checked out Sam Worthington on Cameron's recommendation. Says McG: "I needed someone who could stand up to Christian, and Sam's on a short list of late-twenties, early-thirties actors who aren't waif-heroin-chic little guys like that. He's a tough bricklayer from western Australia who happens to be a very accomplished actor as well."

So in addition to everything else it is and has to be, the scream is — has to be — a guy scream. It can't be a shriek, but it has to be more than a shout. It has to be a bellowing, hellacious thing, a direct spew from Sam Worthington's Aussie innards. It has to be totally...action movie. And so — as the lightning flashes, the thunder rumbles, the apocalyptic rain falls from the sky, and Sam Worthington rises and is reborn in the primal movie mud — he goes:

BUH! BUH! (a sort of final purging, as though the taste of mud, and maybe even the scream itself, disgusts him).

The whole thing takes about thirteen seconds, not bad for a scream. It requires four breaths. And it's sort of funny. It's the only joke in an otherwise jokeless movie — the only smile in a movie that is itself sort of Baleian in its determined lack of laughs. At least, that's what I thought when I was watching a rough cut of the movie with McG back in March, nine days before he presented the movie to executives from Warner Bros. and Sony. The movie wasn't finished. It wasn't close to being finished. The musical soundtrack hadn't even been added, and most of the visual effects were mere digitized placeholders that looked like phantasms from early-nineties video games. But the scream haunted me because of its literal, conceptual, and symbolic importance, and because of its unwelcome potential for mirth. And so when McG asked me what I thought of the movie, I told him, truthfully, that I thought it was great — that it kept on upping the ante on its bold inhuman action sequences while at the same time upping the ante on its human-scale storytelling and managed to be harrowingly impersonal and harrowingly intimate at the same time. And McG said, "Good, good! Excellent! Glad to hear it!" Because that's how he talks.

And I said, "But if you don't mind, I do have one bit of criticism...."

And McG said, "Mind? No! I want to hear it! That's why I showed it to you! I really want to hear what you think! Criticism? Bring it on! Anything — I really want to know!" Because that's how he talks.

And I said, "Well, the scream..."

And McG said instantly, "We're fixing it! It really doesn't work, does it? — but we know that. Sam's a great actor, but he's not a great screamer. Screaming is hard to do, man. And Sam's still got some of that Australian nasality in his voice and it — it doesn't translate."

Now, McG is not an asshole. He's not a tool. It's important to establish that right here, because he's a supernice guy — hospitable and generous to a fault — who's really, really concerned with what other people think of him, not to mention his new industrial-strength Hollywood movie. But people think McG is an asshole because he's named McG. Look him up on IMDb and read the comments — he's "McDouche." He knows this. He talks about it, a lot. "My name is such bullshit," he says. "It's a burden, but my parents never called me anything but." What's weird, though, is that he really is rather McG-ish, just not in the way the haters think. The haters think he's McG-ish in the what-kind-of-guy-goes-around-calling-himself-McG kind of way. They think he's impudent, and has gone the single-moniker route in a pathetic effort to be with-it and hip-hoppy and artistic and cool. When in fact he's McG-ish in the what-kind-of-guy-goes-around-with-the-nickname-his-parents-gave-him-when-he-was-cooing-in-the-crib kind of way. He's not cool at all. He's clean-cut, red-haired, and he wears sweaters with button-down shirts underneath. Why does McG keep calling himself McG when the name is such a burden to him? The answer is simple — a child's answer, really, to a question about a child's name: Because McG gets what he wants.

And so here's how Terminator Salvation happened. A producer named Moritz Borman had the rights to the Terminator series and a script. He asked McG to come to his office to take a look at it. McG didn't want to go. "I thought the idea was a bad one," he says. "The idea of a fourth Terminator seemed not needed. My first blush was, 'I don't need to do that. I want to grow as a filmmaker, I want to grow as storyteller, I'm not interested.' And then I heard that the take was, the Future. I hadn't seen that before, and Cameron only gave us a peek. So I read the script, and I didn't like it. But I had a vision about how I could take it higher. And part of taking it higher was having a very credible actor playing John Connor. So my list was a list of one. I think the most credible and talented actor of his generation is Christian Bale. So I started to fix the script, and I started dialogue with Christian. I chased him over to England, met him in a pub in London, where he was shooting The Dark Knight. I got to talking with him about what I wanted the movie to achieve. He said, 'That sounds great, but I read the script and I don't like it.' In so many ways, he told me to fuck off."

"But he said, 'If you could get the script to a place where you could read it cold and make it entertaining and you could engage the listener for two hours — just at a table read — we'd have something to talk about.' And I said, 'All right, I'm going to get that done.'"

Once he had Bale, McG went after Cameron. Paid him homage. "We met for four or five hours. I wanted to articulate to him why this story was worth telling, one director to another. And the simple point of entry was that this is the world after the bomb has gone off. It piqued his interest."

And that's what the movie is about. Yes, it's about the future. And it's about John Connor, played by Christian Bale, starting out as a soldier and becoming a leader. And it's about John Connor deciding whether to trust Marcus, the amalgam of human and machine played by Sam Worthington. And it's about Marcus's journey to a terrible and tragic self-knowledge. And it's about John Connor's attempt to save the young Kyle Reese, so that he can grow up and become the Kyle Reese who goes back in time and impregnates Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in 1984's The Terminator and thereby becomes John Connor's father. And it's about who gets to say, "I'll be back" and "Come with me if you want to live," two lines without which no Terminator movie can be worthy of the name. But it's also about McG trying to make good on his stated ambition of making a "big movie" on a human scale. Because let's face it: The dirty little secret of all the Terminator movies is that they are incarnations of what they warn against. They're technological artifacts that prophesy a war between humanity and its technological artifacts. They inveigh against the technological future, but they've always been part of the technological present. So their loyalties are divided. We're supposed to root for the humans, but the machines have all the charm and get all the laughs. Aside from Linda Hamilton, it's hard to remember the names of any of the actors who played human beings in any of the Terminator movies.

So you have to give McG credit for messing with the formula — hell, for messing with Jim Cameron. For all of McG's talk of respecting the mythology, Terminator Salvation is notable for what it leaves out. It's the first of the Terminator movies without a charismatic killing machine. (It's got a giant, and typically invincible Terminator-movie trucks, but not a charismatic killing machine.) It's the first of the Terminator movies without an intentional laugh. It's the first of the Terminator movies without time travel. To be honest, it irrefutably demonstrates that time travel is a ridiculous notion, because okay, let's say John Connor doesn't save Kyle Reese — what's he going to do, start disappearing? Not to mention the implicit oedipal tensions that arise from knowing that there's a young kid out there who after he becomes your disciple is going to travel back in time to fuck your mother. But these time loops are revealed as a narcissistic sideshow in Terminator Salvation, a way for Christian Bale to revel in the messianism by which humankind's salvation is linked to his own. The conceptual edge of the movie is borne almost entirely by Sam Worthington's Marcus, who, damned as a human, finds his redemption as a machine. It's a little Pinocchio — Marcus wants to be a real boy — and a little RoboCop, but it's also a little McG, striving to make the most personal impersonal movie that Hollywood will allow.

This is not to say that the themes of Terminator Salvation are not serious, or that McG doesn't take them seriously. They are, and he does. "I think progress needs to be monitored very carefully. I think that which makes us great will be our undoing. If you have a kid, and the kid has polio, and someone gives you a polio vaccine — that's progress, irrefutably. But if we get to a place where automated machines start becoming aware and targeting us as the enemy, that would be bad. Put more simply, if we get to a place where clever lending schemes collapse our economy — that's bad. And so we have to be careful we don't end up like the Marcus character. He feels violated. He signs off on something, and it's way more than he's bargained for. It would be like you or me putting 'donor' on our license. 'Sure, give my spleen to some kid if need be. I signed up for that. But I'll tell you what I didn't sign up for: to wake up on Mars in fifty years with a cock growing out of my forehead. You know what I mean? I feel manipulated here.' "

And yet if T4 is a cautionary tale, it's a cautionary tale about cautionary tales — exactly like poor, underloved T3 before it and T2 before that and T1 before that. McG can honor the myth all he wants, but he was hired to honor the movie first, and the movie is a certain kind of movie: a big, loud action movie, set for summer release, dependent on fanboys and visual effects, and critical to Hollywood's place in the global economy. You go and visit McG on the Warner Bros. lot and you realize pretty quickly that McG bears the same relation to it as an industrialist does to a medium-sized factory. You also realize that he carries his compartmentalization — that strange combination of flamboyant self-confidence and equally flamboyant self-abnegation — onto the screen. He doesn't see what you see. He sees the poetic parts industrially and the industrial parts poetically. And he sees Christian Bale and Sam Worthington giving the same kind of deeply human performance, when in fact Bale bears the burden of being an action-movie hero like a burden — he's stiff and loud and hoarse and unsmiling — and Worthington is the human heart even after he finds out that his heart is mechanical, and so a measure of what remains of us when we have lost everything.

So what myth is McG honoring here, when the most captivating thing about his movie is neither the myth of John Connor nor the myth of the machines that are supposed to kill him? Well, it's a myth that predates the one Jim Cameron fashioned. It's the myth of the guy who wants the myth, the story of the guy who wants the story. So he goes up the mountain and visits the old sage, who has owned the myth forever. And he figures that if he pays his respects to the old mythmaker, the old mythmaker will deem him worthy of it and hand it over to him. But that's not how it goes. See, the way the myth works, you only prove yourself worthy of being given the myth if you find a way to steal it. And so he does. There was a sense of struggle in the making of Terminator Salvation — struggle on the set and the struggle of a director realizing that the only way to honor the myth was to overcome it. And it's that sense of struggle that enlivens the movie and provides context for even the action-movie sequences you've seen before. McG was hoping that the myth would be something he could receive; instead it had to be fought for, with screams only he could fix.